By MITCHELL KALPAKGIAN
The Awakening of Miss Prim: A Novel by Natalie Sanmartin Fenollera (Atria Paperback, Simon & Schuster, 2014), 252 pp.; $15. Available through simonandschuster.com or call 1-866-506-1949.
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Miss Prudencia Prim, an elegant woman of great refinement, delicacy, and propriety with a Ph.D. in sociology and expertise in Russian art and library science, notices a curious advertisement that piques her interest. Seeking employment, she reads about a position for a librarian to catalogue books for a scholarly gentleman. She is most qualified to assume this responsibility by her training. The job description lists another requirement she finds attractive: “Wanted: a feminine spirit quite undaunted by the world.”
Miss Prim senses that she is ideally suited for the position because her high ideals and lofty standards have alienated her from much of the modern world, impressing upon her “the constant feeling of having been born at the wrong time and in the wrong place.” So she considers herself most undaunted by a world with tawdry taste and lowbrow standards that do not conform to her aesthetic sensibility for “all that was worth admiring, all that was beautiful and sublime.”
Miss Prim does not let the third qualification discourage her interest. As she ponders the words “Able to live with dogs and children,” Miss Prim finds no great obstacle in these surroundings despite her inexperience in owning dogs or caring for children. However, when she reads the final test of her competence for the position — “Graduates and postgraduates need not apply” — Miss Prim finds herself at a complete loss. Why would any employer deliberately exclude an educated professional for her higher learning and academic achievement?
The gentleman who interviews Miss Prim, known throughout the book as the man in the winged chair, however, does not conform to the image of the dilettantish gentleman-scholar who collects books and luxuriates in libraries. He lives as a passionate Catholic, the uncle of four children whom he educates by home-schooling, the brother of their deceased mother. This gentleman too is undaunted by the world, cultivates the highest ideals of excellence, and lives an unconventional life. For all their common love for the life of the mind, the grandeur of art, and civilized culture, the man in the winged chair and Miss Prim clash.
Despite the gentleman’s reservations about Miss Prim’s extensive academic accomplishments and despite Miss Prim’s doubts about the wisdom of an uncle home-schooling nieces and nephews (“a group of children who seemed half-wild and didn’t go to school”), he hires Miss Prim as his librarian after she reassures him: “I’m not a conventional person from an academic point of view. I’ve never made use of my qualifications in my career. I don’t use them, I never mention them.”
Once Miss Prim reconsiders the whole situation, she wonders if she should accept the position. First, she disapproves of the gentleman’s “extreme” approach to education and the plight of the children living in “a wild state” that she calls “sheer folly.” Second, Miss Prim, who values neatness, criticizes the state of the home and the library (“Why did the man refuse to repair anything?”).
Next she finds the family’s daily morning visits to the monastery before breakfast an odd habit that serves no educational purpose. She also finds the gentleman’s reclusive habits abnormal (“Sometimes he cloisters himself away almost all day, and it’s not unusual for him to miss lunch and dinner”). Finally, when the man in the winged chair expects Miss Prim to catalogue books without a computer or even a typewriter, she can repress her frustration no longer: “Maybe you’d like me to use a quill pen to catalogue books?”
For Miss Prim it is one thing to react against the banality of the modern world and its mediocre education; it is another thing to go to the lengths of isolation and reclusive retreats that seem like escapes from reality.
Despite these inauspicious beginnings and troubling signs, Miss Prim accepts the offer of librarian, swayed especially by the gentleman’s charm, “his hypnotic masculine courtesy.” For all his idiosyncrasies the gentleman excites the children to learn as he shows them how knights duel and informs them of the code of honor of Geoffrey de Preuilly.
For all his extremism the man in the winged chair evinces a magnanimous soul in caring for his sister’s children and a large heart in teaching many of children in the village classical languages. She cannot ignore the searching questions, insightful remarks, lively spirits, and unspoiled charm of the children who are obviously in love with life and in a state of wonder about learning, thanks to the superior education they are receiving. Without realizing it, Miss Prim has stepped outside of the modern world that alienates her by its lack of tact, taste, standards, and beauty.
Once employed as librarian, Miss Prim finds herself in a simple village surrounded by a traditional old-world culture that preserves the civilized ways of the past by its endearing customs and enriching traditions. All the happily married women of San Ireneo de Arnois who cherish their role as wives naturally assume that an attractive and eligible woman like Miss Prim deserves a husband to complete her life — even despite the librarian’s protests that “I’m totally opposed to marriage” and “I consider it a useless institution and one in decline.”
Accepting out of curiosity an invitation to the local Feminist League, Miss Prim discovers that this organization is neither political nor ideological but social — gracious women dressed with exquisite taste that cultivate a love for the beautiful, elegant, and courteous.
These delightful women not only educate their children at home in the morning but also operate small businesses and have professions that employ them part-time — women who place home and family first and work second. These women are never too busy for “afternoon tea,” frequent spontaneous social gatherings at each other’s home for hot chocolate, desserts, and conversation. Their feminism is simply is the joy and privilege of being a woman.
In this environment of quiet leisure, neighborly friendship, and the relish of simple pleasures, Miss Prim awakens. She discovers that working only six hours a day is a habitual way of life in San Ireneo to provide time for a social life and opportunity for reading and a life of the mind, “one of the main principles upon which our small community is based,” she learns from one of the women.
Miss Prim learns that a chief business for the “feminist” ladies of the village is to find husbands for unmarried women to emancipate them from demanding employers. Miss Prim never heard of such an idea until Herminia explains: A married woman does not have “to ask permission to carry out personal business, as I hazard you have to at work. None of us has to keep our opinions to ourselves, as I’m sure you frequently have to in conversations with your employer.”
Miss Prim is amazed at the abounding joy that fills the daily lives of these fulfilled women and amiable neighbors who allow time for friendship, conversation, hospitality, and learning. Miss Prim’s awakening startles her: “I thought those old ideas of returning to a simple, traditional, family-based economy had vanished long ago.”
Miss Prim’s mind opens when she learns that all the members of the village have retreated from the din of large metropolises to live a quiet human life in touch with civilized norms and family culture. The women especially sought a more natural rhythm to their existence because “contemporary life wears women out, debases the family, and crushes the human capacity for thought.”
From her pose as a woman indifferent to the prospect of marriage, Miss Prim begins to reconsider. She is touched by the thoughtfulness of the women seeking to find her a husband, and she begins to change her mind when a woman she especially admires for her elegance influences her by example: “If someone as beautiful and intelligent as Herminia considered marriage essential to a woman’s well-being, who was she to cast doubt on it so emphatically?”
Miss Prim learns profound wisdom from one of the children who recites a favorite saying from a Russian Orthodox monk: “He always said that angels are in the simple things; you never find angels where things are complicated. He believed that the small things are important.”
A Divine Truth
This, then, is the great awakening of Miss Prim. She too begins to see the angels in the simple, small, ordinary things of everyday life — in the joy of children loving life and excited about learning, in the kindness of women whose loving hearts extend to families, neighbors, and newcomers to the village, in the deep contentment of domestic women who radiate their love of marriage and wish all women to know their joy, in the robust humor and chivalrous gallantry of her gentleman employer who never hesitates to call her “fool” or “extreme” for rejecting an explanation because it is too “religious” as he good-naturedly corrects her secular bias: “The question here . . . is not whether my argument is religious, but whether it’s right.”
Miss Prim seriously begins to think that she does indeed need a husband more than she realizes, especially after the man in the winged chair explains his mother’s gravest fault: She will not subject herself to any authority except her own opinions, the only “tribunal” she consults. “Can you imagine what you would be like if you didn’t have someone close who was capable of influencing you?…My mother doesn’t have the blessing of someone to tell her what she absolutely doesn’t want to hear.”
The opinionated, independent, self-sufficient Miss Prim has encountered an angel — a divine truth — in this simple exchange during an ordinary conversation that releases her from all the subjective opinions and worldly influences that have shaped her life and thought more than she ever realized.
This is a jewel of a novel, one to relish with the most lively of characters, with the most sparkling conversations, and with a treasure of the world’s choicest wisdom.
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(Dr. Kalpakgian is a professor emeritus of humanities.)
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